Posthumous Keats -- A Personal Biography by Stanley Plumly, Norton '08, $27.95, 392 pages, ISBN #0393065731. Index, bibliography, no source notes.
One need not be familiar with the intracacies of poetic expression to appreciate poet Stanley Plumly's graceful and moving new biography of British poet John Keats. For his theme is universal -- a fiercely ambitious young man, who aspires to the acme of his calling, only to realize suddenly that disease will wipe out that promise at the unspeakably premature age of 25.
Recently, cases of now-highly treatable tuberculosis have surfaced here and there lately only as a dim reminder of the 19th and early 20th century, when it was an international scourge. It had fallen to the young poet to be the primary caregiver for his mother and later for his teenage brother Tom in their long, agonizing decline unto death from what was then called consumption, an aptly descriptive label, since it gradually consumed the body and then the spirit.
By the time Keats developed a prolonged sore throat in his early 20s, he knew it could mean only one thing. Usually, it takes about a year to die from tuberculosis, and Keats looked upon this as his posthumous year, while still turning out as much poetry as he could. But he became convinced that his chance at immortality had been dashed to bits. He asked his friends to inscribe on his tombstone the epitaph, Here lies one whose name was writ on water, reflecting his belief that whatever fame he had achieved would be evanescent because of his early death.
Keats would have been surprised to read the obituary of his brother George, dead two decades later of the same dread disease. In it, an American newspaper identified George as brother of John Keats, the distinguished British poet... And still, nearly two centuries after John Keats' death, we revere him and -- better yet -- we read him.
Plumly is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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